A bendable sheet of silicon can hide 95 percent of infrared light, rendering objects essentially invisible to heat-sensing night vision goggles or infrared cameras.

Black silicon is made by growing silicon crystals at various heights on a silicon wafer, creating what looks like a dense forest of needles . This material hardly reflects any visible light, because light waves bounce back and forth between the steeple-like silicon towers, preventing their escape.

Hongrui Jiang at the University of …